Theatre Lovett’s 2013 hit A Feast of Bones is back.
On the Edge (The World Festival of Theatre for Young Audiences), Birmingham, July 2016.
Photo by Ros Kavanagh
Author: Kate Heffernan
Poster Design > The Blue Boy
Brokentalkers‘ The Blue Boy – on its first Irish national tour (spring 2016)
Touring to: Everyman Cork, Mermaid Arts Centre Bray, Pavilion Theatre Dún Laoghaire, Project Arts Centre, Townhall Theatre Galway, Lyric Belfast, Drogheda Arts Festival.
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Poster Design > Project Bar
See you in the bar after the show?
For Project Arts Centre, my home from home.
As modelled by artist Francis Fay (right).
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Montague > How to Dress A ‘Country-and-Irish’ Cowboy
Who invented The Rhinestone Cowboy?
Ukranian-born Nudie Cohn and his Rodeo Tailors made American country stars embrace embellishment in the 1940s, and the love affair still burns strong in Nashville. A music of outsiders, country is about exile and emigration, frontier ballads of outlaws and open plains, heartbreak, loneliness, loss. Country stars wear their hearts on their sleeves, and their stories along their lapels. Cacti, lassos, lone horses, tumbleweed, covered wagons, dry horizons, bare crucifixes – Nudie stitched the icons of their lonely lives into their breast pockets.
So what should an Irish cowboy wear?
Finding its feet in the late 1960s, the Country–and–Irish tradition of music fuses Irish folk with American country, all speeded up to a quick-step rhythm suitable for dancing – ballads of colonial exile sang with a cowboy twang while people jive. The Montague Hotel was a hitching-post on its touring circuit, a regular haunt for the stars of the Country–and–Irish music scene which was hugely popular in the midlands, a key venue through the 70s, 80s and 90s.
The bands traditionally wore matching jackets, but not in the elaborate Rodeo Tailor style.
I find it hard to separate The Montague from Country–and–Irish, and have been thinking about it in this sense – about how the 40-year history of a country is weirdly contained within its walls, the story of who we are, where we’ve been, where we’re going. What if a band was to wear its sense of history, it’s sense of place, its sense of itself on its sleeve? What would these jackets look like? Bog cotton rather than cactus flowers, green plains rather than dusty plateaus? Old wounds becoming scars becoming appliqué embellishments, hardened into a smile by a rhinestone outline?
Maybe. Maybe not.
But, as I sit here tonight, imagining the characters of a band like this, I’m imagining how they might dress.
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Poster Design > Castle Rock by Massive Owl
Bristol live art collective Massive Owl present
Castle Rock, a Distortion of the Film ‘Stand by Me’ at Project Arts Centre, Dublin (March 2016)
Photo by Paul Samuel White.
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Visual Art Research > Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy
These past 10 days, I’ve been knee-deep in research for Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy, a new show by Spanish artist Núria Güell which opened in the gallery at Project Arts Centre last night.
Throughout 2016, the centenary of the 1916 Rising, Project are engaging with acts and idea of ‘rebellion’. Núria Güell uses installation, writing, performance and video for political and social activism, believing that art holds the power to rethink ourselves as a society. Preoccupied by the ever widening gap between rich and poor, some of her projects have included publishing a book that explains how to expropriate money from a bank, entering into a marriage of convenience in order to give legal status to an individual, and creating a company in order to hire a construction worker to demolish doors to enable squatting. For this solo exhibition here in Dublin, she has collaborated with Catalan activist Enric Duran to establish an agency that borrows from the tactics of corporate tax liability systems – in order to advise grass roots social projects on how to practice tax avoidance.
The exhibition screens several films (including Katerina Kitidi and Aris Chatzistefanou’s Debtocracy and Ruaridh Arrow’s How to Start a Revolution). The opposite end of the gallery becomes an ‘office’ for the consultancy, a desk inviting visitors to explore the company website, the wall above it brandished with its logo. I worked on a design for the business cards. Both the desk and business card features a bunch of yellow tulips – a nod to the Tulip Mania which swept the Netherlands in the 17th century, considered the first speculative bubble.
To give a social and historical context for the action of the consultancy, I collaborated with Núria and curator Tessa Giblin to research eight cases of fiscal and civil disobedience. The short texts I wrote and designed became the surface of a coffee table in the consultancy’s ‘waiting area’. The cases came from the distant past right up to the present: Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat at the front of the bus; 18 million citizens of the United Kingdom refuse to pay their Poll Tax; Gandhi leads tens of thousands of followers to disregard the British salt monopoly and harvest their own salt; Charles Stewart Parnell encourages struggling tenants to shun their landlords.
From the dumping of tea into the sea by 200 patriots during the Boston Tea Party in 1773 to a group of independent retailers in a small Welsh town going “offshore” in 2015, I found the research fascinating – uncovering and telling the stories of acts of civil disobedience that have denied unjust laws collectively, publicly, peacefully – realising that Núria Güell and Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy is but the latest in a proud and vibrant history.
The exhibition is one of Frieze Magazine‘s Dublin highlights, and continues until 19 March 2016.
Exhibition photography by Ros Kavanagh. Opening night photography by Senija Topcic.
eight cases
Exhibition Trailer
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Poster Design > They Called Her Vivaldi
Just about to send this poster and flyer to print, a design I’ve been working on for Theatre Lovett’s brand new show They Called Her Vivaldi. On the road and in a venue near you from February 2016.
Photo by Ros Kavanagh
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Peat Research > Aprilfestival and Danish Schools
Aprilfestival: Teater for Små & Store is an annual performance event for young audiences, each year taking place in a different Danish town. This April, over 100 Danish and international companies performed over 600 shows in diverse spaces – from classrooms to viking halls to basketball courts – transforming the 2015 host town of Frederikssund (50km outside of Copenhagen). Traveling to the festival with the support of the Arts Council’s Travel and Training Award (with the Elk project and questions of accessibility on my mind), I was thinking about the festival’s amazingly enabling ethos and core aim – to give every single child in a regional municipality a theatre experience. And I was curious to see how the performance work would fit into non-theatre contexts, how it was changed by the fit-up nature of the festival, by the rough-and-ready settings – and how those spaces were in turn transformed.
I visited some brilliant schools. The performances were woven into the fabric of the day, children moving from maths class to a show to language lab to lunch. Even in the smallest schools, performances might have been taking place at the same time in several classrooms, the gym, the library, the yard. In little rooms, tables and chairs were rearranged into improvised raked seating, windows blacked out with refuse sacks and parcel tape.
For me at least, the less dynamic work was that which attempted to impose a theatrical space where none existed, an obsession with drapes and rigging and blackouts and theatreness, to recreate a black box or proscenium arch, to try too hard to hide the fact that we were in a classroom or a gymnasium. And on the other end of the spectrum, the vibrant work for me was so often that which did the opposite – embracing the non-theatrical nature of the spaces in order to elevate the space and the work itself, an attention to detail and artistry that suspended them without hiding or apologising for them – transforming and reawakening them into an other world.
A plastic bucket school chair takes on a life of its own. The coloured stripes of a multi-use sportshall floor become a key aspect of Lisa Becker and Claus Carlsen’s Besat af æbler for Teatrer Nordkraft (an early years live-art work and my hands-down highlight of the festival). A glossy classroom whiteboard acts as the perfectly reflective projection backdrop for the Northern Lights above the Tundra in World Images by Teater Madam Bach (directed by Imaginary Theatre Australia’s Thom Browning).
So many brilliantly found spaces transformed, so many times I thought, “I really want to make a show here.”
OTHER THOUGHTS
Elk was in my mind. I was thinking about the pathos of a creature doomed to extinction, about how to have an open and frank conversation about the vast world we live in with young audiences while at the same time offering a steady and sympathetic guide to navigating that bigness. And so it was brilliant to be immersed in Danish work, a tradition that does not shy away from the oftentimes dark reality of the world we live in. I encountered performances that dealt in many different ways with death, change and loss.
Teatret Gruppe 38’s Morket Ligger Under Sengen / The Darkness Rests Under the Bed was another highlight of the festival. A story about an older couple who return home to stay with their son, it drew gentle and playful parallels between a toddler’s fear of what lurks beneath their bed, and an elderly person’s fear of what might come in the night. The simplicity of its storytelling, its matter-of-factness, its placement of youth, age, life, death, light and dark on one plane and in one breath will stay with me.
BESAT AF ÆBLER BY LISA BECKER, CLAUS CARLSEN + TEATER NORDKRAFT
MØRKET LIGGER UNDER SENGEN BY TEATRET GRUPPE 38
